Yesterday we hired bikes for 20 Yuan each. Mine was so snazzy it was still half wrapped in bubble-wrap (which I ripped off after about 2 hours of it hitting my leg annoyingly).

We were given a map that we couldn’t follow so we just guessed roughly where we wanted to be heading. Twas pretty scary cycling along the main road with all the other push bikes, motorbikes, cars, buses, trucks, and random pedestrians darting out across the road at any moment.

I apparently worried C, who was behind me, with just how well I was blending in with the local road traffic. According to him I was weaving randomly in and out of the bike lane, cutting off cars and narrowly avoiding being squashed. Quite glad I didn’t know that at the time.

After only about 15 minutes we’d left the big scary road and were happily cycling along more country roads amongst all the rice paddies and karst hills. It was all very very beautiful. And completely worth the leg agony I was in that evening.

In about an hour we’re off to a Chinese cooking class. Yum.

I’ve been guzzling the tasty Sichuan food here as we’re pretty close to that region. It’s very delicious, a little buzzy. I am totally winning the battle of the chillies. C cried. Muha.

Recently some kind person living in a nearby neighbourhood posted a leaflet in our postbox warning us that they had been invaded by citrus gall wasps. After going ‘Aw how kind’ we threw it into the recycling bucket and forgot all about it. Then today C noticed that the branches of our lemon trees were looking suspiciously lumpy.

We’d been invaded!!!

Or rather, our poor lemon trees had. They were full of baby gall wasp larvae munching on their insides. No wonder the lemons were shrivelling on the branches. We rushed inside to look up advice on treating the trees. The only way to deal with a gall wasp invasion is to cut off the galls, preferably before August which is when the adult wasps emerge. This means cutting off branches. Poor sad lemon trees.

So we (or rather C) hacked off the infected branches and wrapped them all up in plastic bags to stop future outbreaks of wasps. It’s probably too far away from hatching time for them to survive not being on a live tree. But just in case we bagged them. So there’s a possibility of a bag in a tip somewhere full of very angry wasps. Beware.

To the left here you can see lemon tree number one before we de-wasped it. To the right is lemon tree number one after the de-wasping. Aw.